Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Energy from Trash Should Be a Priority for Hawaii

The
long term economy of Waste to Energy (WtE) plants is very good. There is plenty fuel
(trash, waste and biomass). Municipalities pay the WtE plant to take
their trash. The utility pays the WtE plant for the mega-watts of
electricity it produces. Trash volume reduces 6 to 10 times so landfill
demand is minimized.

Sweden imports waste from other Europe to fuel its WtE program.
Maui should install a WtE plant and bring in trash from Big Island,
Lanai and Molokai. Oahu should plan for another 100 MW of WtE (about
half of it tuned to burn biomass, sludge and manure) and bring in trash
from Kauai. Barges return to Honolulu from Kauai practically empty.

Both Oahu and Maui should consider ordering a sophisticated MRF, or
Materials Recovery Facility, to better sort materials such as glass (by
color), stones and similar inert materials, and all types of metals out
of the trash. This would result in a cleaner burn at the WtE plant and
revenue from recyclables, e.g., mixed glass is nearly worthless but
glass sorted by color has value. So do sorted metals.

To make Oahu more sustainable we should revise what we currently
trash and what we recycle at home in the BLACK, GREEN and BLUE bins, as detailed in the post below.

Last but not least, The Economist notes that "Energy from waste plants that use trash as a fuel to generate electricity and heat continue to have an image problem. That is unfair, because the technology has advanced considerably and has cleaned up its act." As depicted in the image blow, very large part of modern WtE plants is devoted to pollution control.

Brief Information about Panos

Panos D. Prevedouros, Ph.D. is a professor of traffic and transportation engineering at the Department of Civil Engineering, Univ. of Hawaii-Manoa since 1990.
Panos graduated from the Aristotle Univ. of Greece in 1984, and with Masters and PhD degrees in 1990 from Northwestern Univ. (Evanston, IL), a leading academic institution in engineering and transportation.
He chairs the Freeway Simulation Subcommittee of the Transportation Research Board. He was president of the Hawaii Highway Users Alliance from 2006 to 2008.
Panos co-authored a Transportation Engineering textbook and over 100 reports and technical papers. He received the 2005 Van Wagoner Award of the Institute of Transportation Engineers.
He co-organized the 1st International Symposium on Freeway Operations (ISFO) in Athens, Greece, and the 2nd ISFO in Honolulu in June 2009.
Dr. Prevedouros served in the Transit Advisory Task Force in 2006 and in the Technology Selection Expert Panel in 2008 of the City Council of Honolulu.
He run for mayor of Honolulu in the 2008 elections and finished 3rd in the primary elections with 18% of the vote from a field of nine candidates.